As a teenager, Lindsay Brown read Seventeen magazine, and was especially drawn to real life stories of girls. What Brown never imagined was that at 21, she would do something that millions of teen girls only dream of: 1) tell her real life story and 2) grace the cover of the monthly magazine.

The October issue of Seventeen, which hits newsstands Tuesday, will feature a glammed-up Brown, who won the magazine's second annual "Pretty Amazing" cover contest and a $20,000 college scholarship.

The Newport Beach resident was chosen from thousands of entrants based on a combination of readers' votes and the final decision by a panel of judges that included Ann Shoket, editor-in-chief of Seventeen; Emma Roberts, actress and brand ambassador for contest sponsor Neutrogena; and Jared Eng of JustJared.com.

The contest premise was simple: It asked young women ages 15 to 22 to answer the question, "What makes you 'Pretty Amazing?'"

For Brown, the answer was equally simple. Write from the heart about how she went from playing soccer to using soccer to awaken confidence, self-worth and ambition in young girls who live in Third World countries.

"What set Lindsay apart was her selfless devotion to helping other girls understand their power in the world," said Seventeen's Shoket. "She made a tremendous personal sacrifice – giving up a full scholarship to Notre Dame and resigning from the soccer team she loved."

Brown, a senior at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, voluntarily left the school's soccer team last year, months after returning from an internship in Nepal.

She realized after that seven-week journey that the same passion for the sport that fired her up at Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana and at Notre Dame began to burn for something else entirely: Helping girls like those she met at Kopila Valley Primary School in Surkhet, Nepal. Girls who carried firewood after school to their homes. Girls who were too tired to concentrate in class because they had spent most of the evening taking care of someone else's child. Girls who were too timid to raise their hand in class because the culture they were raised in focused more on empowering boys.

She had taught the game that she loved to those girls – and ended up forming Nepal's first girls' soccer team.

That experience stayed with her, and after leaving the Notre Dame team, Brown immediately co-founded a nonprofit foundation, The SEGway Project (SEGway stands for Soccer Empowering Girls Worldwide and You). The project aims to connect female soccer athletes in the U.S. with girls in Third World countries to take steps to level the gender playing field beyond soccer for those girls.

Brown said she entered the contest not because she wanted the glamour of being on the cover or the scholarship money, but to put the girls in Nepal and other countries on the radar for American girls.

"I was just in shock at first," she said, of the moment she walked into a room on campus filled with her former Notre Dame teammates earlier this week and was told that she won. "When I thought about my girls in Nepal, Cambodia and Kenya, the shock turned into exhilaration. Thirteen million girls are going to see this magazine.

Related Links

Lindsay Brown, 21, of Newport Beach, won the 2nd annual Pretty Amazing Contest held by Seventeen magazine. COURTESY OF AMANDA SCHWAB/STARPIX FOR SEVENTEEN, AMANDA SCHWAB/STARPIX
Lindsay Brown, 21, of Newport Beach, is a former Mater Dei High School soccer player who is now a senior at University of Notre Dame. She won Seventeen magazine's 2nd annual Pretty Amazing national contest. COURTESY OF SEVENTEEN MAGAZINE
At right, Lindsay Brown, 21, of Newport Beach, appears with actress Emma Roberts, Neutrogena brand ambassador, at the 2nd Annual "Pretty Amazing" finalists luncheon hosted by Seventeen magazine at Hearst Tower in New York on June 18. COURTESY OF AMANDA SCHWAB/STARPIX FOR SEVENTEEN

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